Nightmares
by skabs
Summary: Sam has a nightmare, Jessica learns the truth


this is just a one-shot that got stuck in my head before i could go to sleep. not much, but i hope you enjoy!

Supernatural doth not belong to me, it belongs to Eric Kripke

* * *

I wake up with a scream in my throat, my heart stopped and my hand reached out over my head. I beg her to listen, to not leave me… In my head, over and over, I've asked her to understand. Over and over I watch her turn from me without a word. She shifts in her sleep, nudging my shoulder over with her cheek; her hand rests on my chest. I know she'll wake up soon; she always follows me out of my nightmares, especially when they're about her.

Not every nightmare is about me telling her who I am, or what I used to do. Sometimes I watch her burn. The thought of that nightmare makes me thankful that this time I only had to watch her walk away.

"Sam?" she moans, her voice thick with sleep, she can feel how tense my body is, my arm around her waist grips tight. I don't want to let her go. I've found myself selfish with her. I don't want to share.

"Yeah," I whisper, kissing her forehead. I hope she'll fall back asleep, but I know she won't.

"Another nightmare?" she hugs me close, her nose is buried in my t-shirt. She told me once that she likes how I smell. I asked her what I smelled like, since I don't use cologne or scented deodorant. After she got done scrunching her nose up at the pit comment she told me that I smell dry, like wood chips, a little like dust maybe. Sounds like ash to me, but I don't mind that if she likes it so much.

"Yeah," I smell her hair, it smells like cherry blossoms. She fell in love with the scent after visiting Japan with her parents during the festival. She told me that it was like sitting in a snow storm in tank top weather, and that next time I should go with her. I didn't answer her then, a year ago, and I still don't have an answer for her now. I shouldn't even be with her, she doesn't even know me.

"Will you tell me about it?" she asks every time, even though she knows I'll say it's nothing. That I don't remember. "Sam?" I hesitated.

"Jessica," I take a deep breath, it feels like my heart has just started beating again and I can finally get a lungful of air. I sit up, gently nudging her to her pillow before swinging my feet around to the floor.

"Sam, do you want to talk about it?" Her hand snags the back of my shirt; she knows I'm thinking about it. She's a master at getting me to admit things I don't want to admit. Like when she asked about the scar on my hip. I didn't tell her the entire truth, but I had to admit that Dean put it there. She was appalled, since it's a bad scar, four inches and jagged. I'd admitted to her earlier that I was eight when I got the damn thing, then when she learned my older brother gave it to me she'd been beyond upset. Of course I couldn't tell her that an evil spirit had attached itself to me, and cutting the damn leech thing from my skin had been the only way to get it off at the time.

I don't talk about my scars because I can't tell the whole story, but she got some of the pertinent details of them. Thanks to what I can't talk about, all my friends think that my father is a drunk and my brother almost as bad. If I had to name the top ten things that bother me about my father's job, lying about it makes about seven of the top slots. The rest of them go towards Dean. I hate the way he remembers mom, and I don't. I hate the way he just follows our father blindly, pure faith in the man, that he can do no wrong. And I hate the way he had to grow up, at four years old, becoming the responsible one. In all truth, Dean is my mother, father, and brother. I hate having to lie about that.

"Jessica, if I told you the truth about something, about something really big, that you didn't want to hear," I have to take a breath. It feels like my hearts stopped again.

"Sam," she reaches up to my shoulder, rests her head against my back. I feel her breath, warm, against my spine.

"Never mind," I stand up and rub my eyes with my hands.

"No," she gets up behind me and wraps her arms around my stomach, under my shirt. She's tracing another scar, a small one over my belly button. That one I got from Father Jim when I was ten. He was teaching me knife fighting and I advanced when he told me to retreat. That was my own stupid fault, I told Jessica that but she didn't seem to believe me.

"No what?" I put my hands over hers and just let her press herself into my back.

"You don't get to start a sentence like that and just forget it," she hooks her leg around mine and shifts the way I taught her, flinging me back into bed. I let her get the drop on me, but even as I smile I know that my nightmare has come true. I have to tell her. Then I have to watch her walk away.

"I have this dream," I start as she crosses her arms over her chest.

"I know," she smirks.

"I have this dream, that I tell you everything about me, about my family, about how I grew up," I close my eyes and press my hands against them, letting them drop to the sides after I can see the spots under my lids. "And after I'm done telling you, I watch you walk away from me." I hear my own voice cracking, I can feel the tears behind my lids, and then I feel her sitting on the mattress beside me.

"You know, that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard you say," she kisses me.

"You don't understand," I scoff, and then I open my eyes. She's turned on the bedside lamp and she's waiting.

"I won't understand until you tell me," she sits cross legged, hugging a pillow. She's watching me as if she's a five year old waiting for a story.

I take off my shirt.

"That's not the idea I had in mind Sam," she scolds, even as she grins. She likes my abs. She likes to kiss them. I clear my throat, a little embarrassed. She does that to me.

"You've asked about my scars," I whisper, her eyes narrow.

"You've told me about a few of them," she watches now as I point to the round scar on my left shoulder. It looks like a burn mark, and it is, but before I just said cigarette and let her fill in the blanks. She hates my father, by the way.

"The only way to kill a strega is to burn it from the inside. When it exploded a splinter dug into my shoulder. Dean got it out quickly, but the skin still burned enough that the scar remained," I took a breath and continued before she could ask a question. I pointed to the straight scar a little above my heart. "I got in the way of ghost who had a habit of throwing knives at her children, and any other kid who happens to be in her house. Dad was salting her bones while Dean and I were supposed to be at the motel studying. Dean had gotten antsy, I swear he's got ADD, so we went to the house to see if he needed help. I pissed her off and she started flinging things. Dean's got a nice scar on his shoulder from when he started shielding me."

"Sam…"

"My mother died when I was six months old."

"You told me that your nursery caught on fire, it's not your fault Sam," she grips my hand, knowing I feel responsible for it.

"A demon was after me, she interrupted it. It killed her, and burned the nursery. Dad got Dean to get me out, but he was too late to save my mother. We don't know why it wanted me, but ever since my dad's been hunting the thing, and destroying every other weird thing in his path. He raised us on the road, teaching us how to kill things, how to survive. I've learned how to shoot, stab, exorcize spirits, eviscerate demons, and generally how to give the supernatural one hell of a headache." I smirk, just talking now, letting it all out. "My dad's never beaten me; hell, he's probably the only dad in existence who doesn't believe that a spanking could solve every problem. The only time he's ever hit me was when I was training and I didn't duck fast enough. He doesn't drink, I think since the night Pastor Jim told him that what he thought he'd seen was real. That he wasn't going crazy. Drinking heavily is a real good way to get you killed in this business."

"The Ghost hunting business."

"Not much of a business really, truth be known. You don't get paid for it, so you end up traveling the country, taking odd jobs, sometimes credit card scams are the only way to keep yourself fed. Lying becomes second nature; a bald-faced lie could keep you out of jail if you're good enough at it." I gather my courage and look her straight in the eye.

"I've lied to people I care about, first because I know they'd never believe the truth, second because sometimes it's the only way to keep them safe."

"Keep me safe," she hits right to the bone. I look away; her honest gaze is too much for the crap I've just thrown between us.

"If I could keep lying to you about this, I would," I admit. "I didn't want any of this touching you."

"Why?" she lets go of my hand.

"It's not right!" I yell as I stand. "Look, it's dark and insane, it gets people killed! Dean and I, we were raised like warriors! I knew ten ways to kill a man by the time I was five, and I could actually do it by the time I was six. I never spent two consecutive years in the same school, Dean actually got a GED instead of "wasting his time" in school. Its an obsession for him, and for my father, to find the thing that killed our mom. Helping people, and hunting things on the way. And I'm not saying that they aren't doing any good, because they are! But I didn't want to have that life and now here I am admitting all this to you, and I don't even know what the hell I'm doing any more!" I want to punch my hand through the window, just so I'll feel something besides blind panic.

"What was your nightmare about?" Jessica asks, her voice is so flat that I know she's dreading the answer.

"I tell you all this," I watch her reflection in the window; she looks down at her hands and threads her fingers together. "Then you walk away."

She looks up at me, shock in her eyes.

"You've faced off against demons, ghosts, things that go bump, and your nightmare is of me walking out on you?"

"I…"

"Samuel Winchester," she steps off the bed and wraps her arm around my waist, her head rests against my neck. "That is the sweetest thing you've ever said to me." Her other hand reaches over and traces the knife scar again. I shiver as she kisses the back of my neck. The tears start to fall as she turns me around, her hands reach up to my face. Her thumbs brush away the tears, she kisses me.

"Jess… I…" she kisses me again.

"Come to bed, don't worry," her eyes are sad, but her smile wicked. "You won't dream anymore tonight."


End file.
